Three True Stories:

·        Jane was shopping at her favorite grocery store.  She stopped at the deli counter and asked the nice young man on duty for three quarters of a pound of smoked turkey.  He smiled and promptly punched .34 into the electronic scale.  He obviously believed that .34 must be 3/4ths.   Jan was surprised that she was being shorted on her order, but she let it go. He seemed like a nice young man so she didn’t want to say anything. She did want to get what she ordered, however.  From that time on she shopped at another store for deli selections.

·        Ted went to a home improvement store and gave the clerk a diagram of his bathroom floor plan with the dimensions.  The outside dimensions were approximately 5 feet by 10 feet.  The clerk punched figures into a special calculator.  He then proclaimed that Ted needed to buy 400 square feet of tile for his bathroom.  Ted did a quick mental calculation and came up with 50 square feet.  He left the store without making a purchase. He wasn’t sure if the employees of that store were incompetent or if they were deliberating cheating their customers.  Either way, he warned all of his friends and acquaintances to shop elsewhere.

·        Pete was in charge of ordering rolls of roofing material for his company.  On a particular job a special material was required to do the job.  He punched the numbers in to his estimating software.  A week later the order was delivered—three times more than he needed.  Since it could not be returned, he had a truck pick it up and store it in his company’s warehouse.  This was a fairly regular occurrence and eventually the warehouse filled to capacity with extra material. His employer never knew how much money was being wasted until he was locking the doors on his business.

These three scenarios all have the same theme—complete and utter reliance on technology without a shred of common sense. Do these kinds of things happen often? Absolutely!  The hard part of writing this article was to limit my examples to three.

Employees make thousands of decisions every day.  Some are insignificant while others can have serious consequences.  Just ask the owners of any company if losing money through preventable mistakes is a big deal.  In today’s economy a little difference can make all the difference.

Critical thinking is a huge part of any job.  That is where training comes in.   Regardless of the topic, critical thinking is a significant part of most training programs.  The classroom is a great place to discuss concepts that can be applied to real life situations. Training participants are often challenged to provide workable solutions to problems.  They are also taught to catch small mistakes before they become big problems.

What’s the difference between employees who have been exposed to the critical thinking process and those who have not?  It’s simple. If you want to be in business in two years from now, you must have critical thinkers on your payroll.

Copyright January, 2009 Wayne T. Belanger